Something Real, Something True
by birdbox
Summary: What surprises Julia the most is her absolute clarity of mind after she finds out the truth.


**As a disclaimer, I really do ship Julia and Barbie as much as the next person (really, I'm obsessed with them right now) I just thought this would be a -for lack of a better word- fun little scenario as to what the eventual inevitable confrontation would be between them. I've deliberately left it quite open as to exactly how she finds out because I don't have a clue about that right now, this is just the aftermath of it.**

**It'll be negated by canon in 1x10, but enjoy!**

What surprises Julia the most is her absolute clarity of mind after she finds out the truth. She's always been a fairly rational person, not easily given to emotional reactions, but even she would have thought finding out the man she had been sharing almost everything with recently -her confidences, her house, her bed- murdered her husband would stir up tears or some more emotion than detached, clinical anger. She expects the emotional reaction will arrive later, when she's alone, when the enormity of the betrayal really hits her; but for now, she's grateful for her clear head because with it, she knows exactly what to do next.

The plan takes a surprisingly little amount of pre-planning and preparation and the only real handiwork Julia has to do is to get the power drill from her shed to replace the loose screws on the high curtain rail in her living room. The rest is easy, a set of methodical tasks completed one by one—she's done low-level undercover work in the past, and this, strangely, feels the same. Julia uses her curling irons to tame her hair into more organised curls than her natural hair style and teases the roots with the tips of her fingers to give herself the 'bed hair' look. Next is the pale foundation and coal black mascara, and finally she paints her lips bright red with the lip-stain she's barely worn before. The finishing touch is her best lingerie, again, not used in years, and her black killer heels. Her grey dressing gown goes over the ensemble and she waits in the armchair for him to come in.

As she waits for him, twinges of doubt enter her mind about whether this is the right course of action, whether he'll even fall for it, but they are all beaten off with the thought of he killed Peter. She is waiting there for just under an hour, just after it gets dark out, before she hears the familiar sound of his footfalls on her porch. As he enters with all the security and conviction of a permanent resident which annoys her further -it was never his house- Julia steels herself and takes a deep breath.

Barbie turns the lamp on. "Julia?" he calls out.

Julia, still sitting in the arm chair with her back to him, arranges her made-up face into her best coy, come-hither smile and stands up. She turns on her heel and walks to him, slowly. "I've been waiting for you," she tells him, voice as sweet as sugar and it's not even a lie.

Once she's close enough, she undoes the belt of her dressing gown and slips it off her shoulders. His eyes widen as he takes her in, her hip cocked in white silk and black lace brocade lingerie, and his mouth falls open slightly. Julia plays her part, biting her lip as she blinks up at him through her thick lashes. She reaches forward and pulls him to her by his belt loops and kisses him. If he questions why she's suddenly making such an effort for him when this morning he saw her with greasy hair in her ratty sweats, he doesn't say anything and rather he kisses her back eagerly. Typical guy-when it comes down to it, they're always ruled by their other head, even the best of them. He moans her name in between kisses. She pours a different kind of passion into it than their usual encounters, undoing his jeans for him, and keeping him distracted while she discreetly manoeuvres them over to the wall like it's unintentional. They're close enough to the curtain rail for her plan to work and Barbie interprets the smile he feels against his own lips as something completely other to what it really is.

"I want you to tell me something," Julia breathes into his ear while he presses kisses down her neck. "Something real, something true."

She lifts his arms to pull his t-shirt over his head.

"Like what?" Barbie asks breathlessly, still distracted with her jaw and neck.

She holds his hands in the air, even as his shirt hits the floor, quickly grabbing the fluffy handcuff she'd attached to the curtain rail and hid behind the curtain. She snaps it around his wrist.

"Like what the fuck you did to my husband!" Julia spat angrily into his ear and backs away before he even realises what's going on.

Barbie snaps his head up to see his handcuffed wrist and pulls fruitlessly against the bar. Julia had made an uneducated estimate when she replaced the screws that he could probably pull the bar right off the wall if he tried hard enough, but she's not going to tell him that. "Don't bother," she tells him tonelessly, taking the small keys out of her bra where they'd been lying flat against her skin. "I replaced the screws in the bar before. Funnily enough, I bought the handcuffs for my honeymoon, I haven't used them since."

She picks up her dressing gown and pulls it around herself, refastening it and kicking off her heels. "Julia, what are you doing?!" Barbie asks urgently, pulling his wrist again.

Julia crosses her arms, unimpressed. "I told you what I want from you. Tell me what you did to Peter and then I'll let you go. In fact, I can't wait to let you go just so you can get as far away from me as is physically possible."

He barely reacts to that, aside from his jaw flexing. "I told you, he must have skipped town-"

Julia throws her head back laughing, interrupting him. "Oh god! You can't even be honest with me now?! You're half-naked, you're chained to my curtain rail with fluffy handcuffs and you're still lying to me?!" Her voice turns into a shout halfway through. "But you know what the funniest thing is? I already know what you did."

That shocks him, although it's hard to tell from his face. He's always been a hard man to get a read on, but now he's being interrogated he's even more closed off. Julia guesses it's military instincts. She's made a point over the last few days of trying to understand what his expressions really mean though and she sees the flash of surprise in his eyes before he can cover it. "What?"

"I know what you did, Barbie." She sighs tiredly and walks a bit closer to him. "What I want is to hear it from you. The full story. I wasn't lying before; I want something real, something true from you. I don't think that's too much to ask."

Barbie looks at the floor instead of at her and it seems cowardly of him. Julia's always thought he's a pretty brave guy, all the things he's done and all the ways he's put his own life in danger to keep people safe since the dome came down seemingly without any other motivation than to be a good guy. It's partly what attracted her to him because she values bravery without selfish interests at heart. It's hard to look at him now, she finds it difficult to reconcile the two sides of him she now knows: the cowardly murderer and the brave hero of Chester's Mill.

"The first time you lied," she continues with an edge in her voice that she can't tamp down, walking in lines down her living room. "I can almost understand why you did, I was actually close to forgiving you for it. You didn't know me, didn't know I was married to the man who was probably just a name on a list to you. I was offering you a place to crash and potentially an ally in the brave new world, right? And once you start lying, it's hard to stop and own up until you're confronted, I get that. But the second time? That day in the hospital? You actually told me you thought he'd 'skipped town' when you knew full well that he hadn't. That he never left at all."

"I'm sorry, Julia," he says quietly. "I'm really sorry."

"Then prove it," she tells him. "Tell me everything."

He nods slowly, and drops his head like a man condemned. After a long silence, his voice is low and stiff, giving her the military-style clinical statement of events."Nine days ago, I went to the cabin after I got that voice mail from your husband. He didn't have the money he owed. We fought and I told him he had a day to pay up or face the consequences. I was leaving when he pulled a gun on me." Julia swallows, blinking back the long-awaited tears. She can see where this is going but she needs to hear it. Barbie finally looks her in the eyes. "I tried to wrestle it off him but there was a struggle and-"

"-You killed him," Julia finishes softly.

All the energy leaves her at once and her body crumples onto her couch. It is completely silent for a long time, Julia holds her head in her hands with her eyes closed. It's hard not to picture the scene of Barbie and Peter, fighting until a gunshot makes Peter's body go limp. A feeling of nausea sweeps through her, wrapping itself around her throat and ringing in her ears. Since the dome came down, Julia had believed she wasn't afraid of anything any more, that there was nothing anyone could do or take from her that really meant anything but the shock and hurt that this causes takes her breath away. As if the initial stab in the gut -the murder of her husband- wasn't enough, of course it had to be Barbie who did it, twisting the knife in her. It's kind of thing she'd see on soap operas and think to herself, how could anyone let their lives get so messy? Being on the inside looking out this time, she finds she still doesn't understand any better.

If only to escape her circuitous thoughts, mired in exquisite loss and betrayal, Julia stands up uncertainly. "What did you do with him? His- his body?" she murmurs into the air, barely wanting to know.

"I buried him. In the woods." It's marginally better than she was expecting and beginning to imagine. Better than dumped somewhere like the sewers or the rubbish or the other usual murder victim disposal methods she reads about. Julia doesn't think Barbie's main motivation was giving him a good resting place so much as not getting caught but it takes a little of the pain away anyway.

Pretty good at that, she'd told him while he dug Alice's grave, so terribly ironically without even realising it. How he must have laughed at her inside his head when she said that.

Julia walks over to stand in front of him again, as though looking at him will provide any more answers or solace as to why he did it. Well, of course she knows why he did it- because Peter tried to fight back and failed. But she doesn't know why he lied for so long, kept up this whole pretence to her of being a good guy formerly trapped in a bad job. Why he kissed her in the rain, made love to her, made her feel special and wanted for the first time in a long time. Everything about their 'thing' over the past few days now seems excessively sadistic and emotionally manipulative, even for him. Why fake a relationship with the wife of someone you murdered not a week before? It's the only thing she really needs an answer to now.

She swallows the lump in her throat at the realisation that it was all pretend for him. Her affections wasted and worthless to him, perhaps a distraction from the harshness of life under the dome. She feels dirty, used, like a sex object. "So," she chokes back finally. "In this grand web of lies you've told, Barbie, where do I fit in?"

Looking up again, his eyes bore into hers. "What do you mean?"

Her face curls with the bitterness and betrayal she feels, because he's being cruel—more so than she ever imagined he was capable of. "What am I to you, Barbie?" she goads, masochistically. "Go on, tell me. Am I an easy lay? A warm mouth? Sick, little trophy fuck-?"

Julia barely gets the last one out before Barbie's growling, "No!" He says it with more strength of feeling than anything he's said so far, and seems to forget he's bound at the wrist because he pulls forward again, as if to reach out for her. She barely reacts.

He exhales jaggedly, scrubbing his free hand down his face. He looks like he wants to say something but doesn't know quite how to phrase it. "Julia, look-I'm... If you don't believe anything else I say tonight, you have to believe me when I say this," he implores desparately, gesturing between them. "That this, you and me, it had nothing to do with your husband."

"Except that it did, because I wouldn't have fucked you if I'd have known the truth, or if Peter hadn't 'skipped town' in the first place!" she shouts, shaking her head. "Do you see why I'm having trouble believing anything that comes out of your mouth right now?"

"Of course I do!" No longer unsure of his words, Barbie talks so fast she has to concentrate to keep up."Nothing I've done has been right by you and I'm sorry for that. Honestly, I am. I'm sorry that I'm the reason your husband is dead. I'm sorry that we both lied to you for so long—I'm sorry on your husband's behalf too because he had it absolutely right when he said you deserve better. But... I'm not sorry I got involved with you. I shouldn't have, this would be less painful for you if I hadn't, but I'll never be sorry that I did. Because it was real for me. All of it was."

Standing close to him, he seems earnest; his words are pretty and seductive and invariably hit exactly where he intended them to. Julia holds back from believing them though, because every time she's believed him he's stabbed her in the back over it. Or more appropriately perhaps, the heart. She won't make that mistake again. Instead, she tears her eyes away from his intense grey-blue gaze and drops the handcuff key into his hand. "Pack your stuff," she tells him quietly, walking away. "Don't come back. I get that while we're trapped in here, it'll be impossible to avoid me completely but you stay the hell away from me. I mean it."

He undoes the handcuff and collects up his clothes silently. Julia sits on her couch, wrapping her arms around her torso and shutting her eyes. Soon after, she hears him puttering about upstairs, gathering his things.

Once he's gone, she'll have to wash and change the sheets on her bed, in the spare room too. In such a short space of time, he's made them smell like him; like his deodorant and wood and something else she can't put a name to. Peter always smelt like the hospital, clinical like disinfectant or soap, so there was never much difference between his scent and the fabric softener Julia uses. With Barbie, she can smell him before she even lies down fully, even when he's not there. That will have to go. All she wants now is to go to bed and curl up and mourn and cry and sleep and forget, his scent wrapping around her is the last thing she needs.

Barbie is quick gathering his stuff and before she knows it, he's padding quietly down her stairs again. Julia forces herself not to turn around even when he hesitates at her door, even when he whispers "I'm sorry," in to the air between them, even when the door clicks shut behind him. What she should have done, what she still should do, is go and tell Linda to arrest him. Dale Barbara is a confessed murderer. He shouldn't be allowed to walk the streets without some sort of justice being doled out to him. Rationally she knows it's what society is built on; people getting what is perceived to be their just deserves.

She tells herself that the only reason she isn't telling Linda is that there is no justice now, under the dome. Linda would at the most keep Barbie in the cells under the police station for a few hours, or until she needed his help again. Linda would tell Julia that the nearest court is out in Westlake and they don't have the resources to make the police cells into a long term jail or create any type of provisional court but that he will be brought to justice just as soon as everyone gets out of the dome.

Then, if they ever do get out of the dome, in the chaos that would ensue with the army probably quarantining the place and all sorts of investigations occurring, Barbie could and probably would slip away. Make a new life for himself somewhere under a new name. Julia has no doubt that it's not beyond his capability to create himself a new identity. No one would find him and nobody would ever really try to; she could try to make noises about Peter's murder, but would the authorities care much about the pre-dome murder of a gambling addict in the fall out of huge unprecedented supernatural event?

It's true that there is no justice now. But it's not the reason she isn't reporting him, not really.

The house is quiet now, eerily so, as she mechanically drags herself upstairs to change and scrub her face free of the make up. He only had that rucksack of stuff with him this whole time, but she can see the things of his that have gone. The sock he left next to the bed in the spare room. His toothbrush in the holder next to hers in the bathroom. The shirt he wore when they kissed in the rain on the drying rack. Julia hates that their absence only serves to remind her more of him. Instead of getting into her bed, the one she woke up with him in this morning, she gets a clean thick blanket from the cupboard and goes back to the couch.

It's fully dark now, a crescent moon's reflected light being filtered through the dome and again through her window. And finally, tears drip onto Julia's cushion.

**Not even sure that made sense all the way through and not entirely happy with the ending, but this has been a labour of love for a few days now so I can't bear not posting it before it gets negated by the canon episode :) Tell me what you thought anyway.**


End file.
